Are Brexiters immune to irony?

One of the most commonly cited objections to membership of the EU were the complaints that the EU is undemocratic and that it's not right that unelected technocrats and political appointees should rule over our lives.

On June 23rd 2016 37% of the UK electorate voted in favour of a haphazard abandonment of the EU without anything even remotely resembling a coherent plan of action for what comes next. The immediate reaction of the Prime Minister David Cameron was to hand in his resignation and begin drawing up a list of his Tory mates to stuff into the unelected House of Lords and shower with knighthoods, OBEs, CBEs and other gongs.

The House of Lords

In the end Cameron stuffed thirteen new Tory cronies into the ridiculously bloated House of Lords including two multi-millionaire Tory donors (Andrew Fraser and Jitesh Gadhia). He wanted to stuff two more Tory donors in there too but Michael Spencer (who was embroiled in the Libor rigging scandal) was rejected by the scrutiny committee and Remain Campaign bankroller Ian Taylor turned down the peerage because he didn't like the negative publicity.

Thanks to David Cameron's six years of cronyism the House of Lords is now the second biggest legislative chamber in the world, second only to the Chinese parliament. It's by far the biggest unelected chamber, and as such is an affront to democracy. An awful lot of Brexiters seem immune to the irony that their vote to quit the EU is going to hand even more political power to the unelected £300 per day plus expenses House of Lords political cronies club.

Theresa May

David Cameron's replacement as Prime Minister Theresa May outright refused to intervene to stop David Cameron's brazen display of political cronyism. Interestingly she was appointed as leader of the Tory party without a hint of democracy. The 150,000 Tory party members should have been given a vote on their next leader, but the other candidate Andrea Leadsom was leaned on to withdraw from the contest so that may could be anointed as Prime Minister without any filthy oiks having their say.

The Bank of England

As a result of the vote for Brexit the widely reported economic chaos happened. The Bank of England slashed their economic growth forecast for 2017 from 2.3% to just 0.8%, which was the worst decline in economic expectations since records began.

Nowadays in the UK monetary policy is decided by a small group of unelected technocrats called the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC).

The nine member MPC is comprised of the Governor of the Bank of England (appointed by the government) four external members (appointed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer), the Bank's chief economist and three deputy governors.

These nine unelected technocrats have enormous powers to influence the lives of ordinary people through tinkering with interest rates, propping up failed banks, inventing hundreds of billions of pounds out of nothing to flood the financial markets or buy up corporate bonds ... Yet there is no democratic accountability whatever and virtually nobody has even heard of the members of this tiny unelected group.

The response of these unelected technocrats to the Brexit mess was to use it as an excuse to create £170 billion out of nothing to flood it into the financial sector. Their own evidence from last time they did they created cash out of nothing after the financial sector insolvency crisis is that 40% of the economic benefit went to the 5% of wealthiest households, but they've decided to do exactly the same thing again rather than trying a different approach.

Instead of using the newly created cash to invest directly into stuff like infrastructure, jobs, house building, services, education, industrial development ... (things that benefit everyone) they've decided to distribute the cash to the private banks to funnel into unsustainable house price and asset inflation bubbles (things that almost exclusively benefit the wealthiest people in society).

The irony

As a direct result of the vote for Brexit David Cameron used his resignation as an excuse to stuff another 13 unelected Tory cronies into the House of Lords, the UK now has an unelected Prime Minister pursuing a fanatically hard-right agenda (just like a lot of people predicted) and the unelected technocrats at the Bank of England MPC are using the (widely predicted) economic chaos as an excuse to pump vast amounts of newly created cash into the private banks to gamble with as they please.

It's absolutely obvious that the UK is an undemocratic shambles dominated by political cronyism, private corporate power and unelected technocrats, yet there's hardly any outcry about it from Brexiters. It's as if they're perfectly content with cronyism and unelected technocrats ruling over their lives, as long as they're British* cronies and technocrats.

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OR

* Or in the case of the Bank of England Governor Mark Carney - an unelected Canadian technocrat appointed by British Tories.

The bizarre Tory effort to rebrand themselves as "The Workers Party"

If you ever needed another demonstration of how insanely out-of-touch the Tories are with reality, you just need to consider the plan by Tory party chairman Grant Shapps Michael Green to rebrand the Tory party as "The Workers' Party".

There is so much wrong with this proposed rebranding it's incredible. It would be funny if it weren't so Orwellian.

Party funding
[Main article]
         
The Tories, and their braying supporters in the corporate controlled press have constantly attacked the Labour party over the fact that their party is mainly funded by small donations from hundreds of thousands of ordinary workers, via democratically organised institutions (the trade unions). Meanwhile the Tory party is funded by a rogues gallery of extremely dodgy rich people, without the faintest trace of democratic accountability.

How on earth could anyone be stupid enough to expect a political party that is majority funded by donations of over £50,000 a shot from the super-rich, to represent the interests of ordinary workers?

How on earth could anyone be stupid enough to expect a political party that has a secretive inner cabal of super-rich donors that it refers to as "The Leaders Group", to represent the interests of ordinary workers?

How on earth could anyone be stupid enough to expect a political party that allows their wealthy donors to write up their own wish-list of anti-worker legislation as official Tory party policy, to represent the interests of ordinary workers?
         
Wage Repression
[Main article]

One of the strongest pieces of evidence that the Tories actively work against the interests of ordinary workers is the fact that since they came to power in 2010 the ordinary workers of the UK have suffered the longest sustained fall in real incomes since records began!

The Tories have fueled this decline in real incomes with their derisory increases in the minimum wage, their attacks on public sector pay, their refusal to legislate against companies that employ the majority of their staff on Zero-Hours Contracts, their massive expansion of Stalinist forced labour schemes, their cuts to in-work social security payments and their constant claims that "Britain is Bankrupt".

All of these factors have driven down the incomes of the poor and ordinary. What makes this deliberate Tory campaign of wage repression even worse is that the super wealthy elite have spent the last four years making themselves richer than ever.

Workers rights

The Tories have a long history of attacking workers rights. Just think of their ideological attacks on the trade union movement during the 1980s. These attacks have continued under the current government. There's the financial attack against people that have been unfairly dismissed, the revocation of established workers rights from people forced onto Iain Duncan Smith's Stalinist mandatory labour schemes, the increase in the state pension age, George Osborne's ludicrous "Shares for Rights" scheme, the parts of the "Gagging Law" designed to silence trade unions from speaking out on behalf of their members, and there's also the element of the "Gagging Law" designed to attack the right to privacy of trade union members.

If the Tories were really "The Workers' Party" would they really have spent the last four years deliberately undermining workers rights?
      
International Labour Day
[Main article]

If there is one thing that illustrated the Tory contempt for the value of labour more than any other, it must have been their plan to scrap the May bank holiday, which is celebrated worldwide as International Labour Day.

Grant Shapps Michael Green

I don't normally go in for the personality politics side of things, but it is impossible not to note that the man behind this ludicrous Tory rebranding exercise is the Internet conman turned Tory party chairman, Grant Shapps Michael Green. Grant Shapps' Michael Green's Internet con involved selling a programme that stole the creative content of other websites, changed a few keywords, then packaged the stolen content up into fake websites, in order to cash in on Google Ads. As he was doing this scam, he hid behind the false name Michael Green, and allegedly a number of other fake names too.

When Google figured out his scam, they blacklisted any site using the Grant Shapps Michael Green programme from their Google Rankings. Grant Shapps Michael Green is a man so corrupt that his dodgy Internet scams have even been blocked by Google!

It's no wonder at all then, that this corrupt con man has devised a new fraud, designed to con gullible members of the public into believing that the Tories represent the interests of ordinary workers, when the evidence is so absolutely clear that they don't.

Conclusion

This Tory rebranding exercise is a plan built on the assumption that the public are so extraordinarily gullible and ill-informed that they will simply accept this ludicrous new Tory narrative, in the same way that they have lapped up so many other ludicrously counter-factual Tory narratives (the Great Neoliberal Lie, The "Making Work Pay" fallacy, the "We're All in This Together" fallacy, the "your human rights are a burden that need to be scrapped" narrative ...).

The evidence is absolutely clear; the Tories are the anti-worker party, yet they believe that there are enough hopelessly gullible people in the UK that this blatant propaganda effort to rebrand themselves as the opposite of what they are will win them a significant number of votes, otherwise they wouldn't be trying it.

The Tories are once again assuming that the people of Britain are such a feeble-minded bunch that they'll believe any old rubbish they're told, no matter how blatantly counter-factual it is.


 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.
         

More articles from
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

                   
 The Tory ideological mission
           
The Great Neoliberal Lie
                  
What is ... Wage Repression?
           

David Cameron's internet censorship plans
     

The economic case against tax-dodging 
   
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The Tory "War on Justice"

             

The JP Morgan plan for Europe
         
The "Making Work Pay" fallacy

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The mainstream media oligopoly
           

More Tory hypocrisy: Stuffing the Lords

On August 1st 2013 the Tory led government announced the addition of yet another batch of unelected political stooges to the anti-democratic House of Lords. Of the 30 new life peers, 14 are Tories, 10 are Liberal Democrats, 5 are Labour and one Green.

The fact that the Prime Minister of the day can simply select as many life peers as he likes to sit in the unelected House of Lords is one of the most anti-democratic examples of political patronage in world politics. To put the absurdity of our anti-democratic upper house into perspective, try to imagine for a moment the public outrage in the US or France if it was suggested that their fully elected senates were replaced with a system of unelected cronyism like ours.

Since David Cameron came to power three years ago, he has added an incredible 160 new life peers, which come at an average £130,000 a year cost to the taxpayer. This is a rate of 53 new peers a year, meaning that Cameron is adding unelected cronies to the House of Lords faster than any Prime minister in history. Tony Blair is the only Prime Minister to have averaged even half the rate of Cameron (34 peers a year). The rest of the people to have served as Prime Minister since Life Peerages were introduced, have added new peers at a rate of less than 25 a year. David Cameron's predecessor Gordon Brown only added only 34 peers in his three years, a fifth of the rate at which Cameron is currently stuffing the House of Lords.

Thanks to David Cameron's policy of stuffing the House of Lords, it has swelled to an incredible 861 members, none of them directly elected by the public and all of them entitled to £300 a day, plus expenses, plus subsidised food and drink in the various expensive eateries in parliament.

It is rumoured that Cameron has given the green light to yet another 23 Life Peers, but they are being made to wait a while before getting their free pass into the House of Lords because the government were afraid that adding more than 50 unelected peers in one go simply wouldn't wash with the public.

One of the most glaring problems with Cameron's abuse of the Life Peerage system is that several of the people he has given peerages to also happen to be enormous donors to the Conservative party. The pick of the current crop of 30 new lords is Anthony Bamford (of JCB fame) who had donated well over £2 million to the Tory party since 2001 via personal donations and donations through the JCB company accounts. Several other massive donors to the Tory party to have been given direct access to our pseudo-democratic parliamentary system include Philip Harris (£485,000 in Tory donations), Stanley Fink (£2.6 million in Tory donations), John Nash (£300,000 in Tory donations), Dolar Popat (£250,000 in Tory donations), George Magan (£800,000 in Tory donations) and Robert Edmiston (£1.1 million in Tory donations via his company). [source]

The fact that Cameron is rapidly stuffing the House of Lords with scores of Tory and Lib-Dem peers (including a concerning number of major Tory party donors) as a matter of official government policy is hardly surprising. It is clearly in the interests of the government to ensure that the unelected upper house is sympathetic to the government, so that any legislation the House of Commons passes, will simply be rubber stamped by the upper house. Stuffing the House of Lords with sympathetic cronies is exactly the kind of strategy one would expect of a self serving government with an aversion to oversight and accountability.

The problem for the Tories when it comes to their policy of stuffing the House of Lords with unelected political cronies, is that it runs entirely contrary to another Tory party policy, the electoral boundary reforms that were shot down in 2012 by the only noteworthy Liberal Democrat rebellion to date. The boundary reform plan was to reduce the size of the elected House of Commons from 650 members to 600, in a way that would ensure that the vast majority of seats to be lost would be in Labour and Liberal-Democrat constituencies.

Can anyone remember the Tory rhetoric on this? That a parliament of 650 is too big and unwieldy? Can anyone remember the official Tory party statement when the boundary reform legislation was defeated by the opposition parties and various Liberal Democrat and Tory party rebels? Well if you don't remember, here's the official statement released by David Cameron's press office:
 

"The Prime Minister's view is that he is strongly in favour of smaller, cheaper and fairer politics"

Now think about the way Cameron has been stuffing the House of Lords with scores of totally unelected Tory members (including several extremely wealthy Tory party donors) at an average cost to the taxpayer of £130,000 a year each. Think about the way Cameron has swelled the size of the unelected House of Lords from 704 members in 2010 to 861 now, with yet another 23 waiting in the wings.

Do these sound like the actions of a man that is "strongly in favour of smaller, cheaper, fairer politics"?

Do they buggery!

Once again Cameron's actions expose the emptiness of his words as just another populist justification narrative to obscure his real motivations (cementing Tory power by eliminating the parliamentary seats of opposition MPs). It is absolutely staggering that a man of such brazen dishonesty is able to serve as Prime Minister, he lies repeatedly and virtually everything he says is coated in a veneer of misleading political spin.

That Cameron is stuffing the Lords at an unprecedented rate is an incontestable demonstration that he was outright lying about his justification for boundary reforms. He clearly hasn't got the faintest interest in making politics smaller, cheaper and fairer. So what is the real motivation behind the Tory political reform agenda?

Lets think about how it is even possible to describe an elected house of 650 members as bloated and inefficient and demand that it is reduced by 50 members, whilst simultaneously believing that an entirely unelected house of 704 is nowhere near large enough and stuffing it with an additional 160 members in the space of just three years.

In my view, the only possible conclusion to draw from this contrast is that in the minds of people like David Cameron, the problem with the UK electoral system isn't that it is archaic, unrepresentative and riddled with anti-democratic practices, but that there is actually too much democracy and nowhere near enough unelected political privilege for their liking.

 

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

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 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

       
 What do Tory donors get for their cash
   
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The Boycott Warburtons campaign

In July 2013, standing in a Warburtons bakery in Wednesbury near Birmingham, the Chancellor George Osborne gave a positively Orwellian press conference about the so-called economic recovery.

The contents of George Osborne's speech are worthy of criticism, but I'll leave that to the economist Ha Joon Chang who expertly trashes Osborne's misleading propaganda in this article, and to the New Statesman magazine, who provide another five compelling reasons to reject Osborne's misleading "economic recovery" propaganda.

What I'm going to focus on is the ties between the Conservative party and Warburtons Ltd, where Osborne's speech was made.

In April 2010, in the build-up to the General Election, Warburtons Ltd gave the Conservative party a £25,000 donation. In the very same month, David Cameron launched the Tory election campaign in a Warburton's bakery, against a background of Warburtons products.

After three years of devastating ideological austerity, Warburtons once again allowed their facilities to be used as a backdrop for Tory party propaganda by allowing George Osborne to make his ludicrous "recovery" speech at their Wednesbury plant.

Perhaps Warburtons were under the impression that donating cash to the Tories and hosting Tory publicity stunts would somehow result in some positive publicity for their brand? I rather suspect the opposite is happening. There is now a growing Boycott Warburtons campaign on social media, meaning that they are likely to regret their close association with David Cameron and George Osborne, and their implicit support for the ideological austerity experiment which has impoverished so many of their own customers.

If you do intend to boycott Warburtons, one thing I would recommend is that instead of just boycotting their product range, you should send them a quick email to make them aware of your reasons for boycotting their products.

Here is their customer services email address:
customercare@warburtons.co.uk

Here is their customer feedback form:
Click here

An individually written email is always more effective than a copy n' paste job. However, if you are pressed for time or don't have the confidence to write your own, please feel free to copy n' paste the standard letter I have prepared below.

Here are a few tips on what to write if you decide to contact Warburtons with your concerns:

1. Remember to be polite. A rude email is unlikely to convince anyone of anything, other than to harden their stance against anything you say.

2. Tell them that you are a customer and that you will be boycotting their products until you are certain that they have publicly apologised for their involvement with the Conservative party and ideological austerity. 

3. Be concise. The recipient is almost certain to be a busy working person. Try not to exceed a few short paragraphs, anything longer and your message is likely to go unread.

4. Request a response. Ask that someone in authority replies to your concerns.

5. Follow up: If no response is forthcoming, forward the original email to them after a few days with a covering note explaining that you are awaiting a response.

=======================================================================

Dear sir/madam,

I am just writing to let you know that I am boycotting the Warburtons product range because of your support for the Conservative party.

The political party your company has chosen to support with a £25,000 donation in April 2010 (and with publicity stunts such as George Osborne's recent appearance at the Wednesbury bakery) have caused economic havoc. The average wage has fallen by 9% in real terms since they came to power, long-term unemployment has sky-rocketed, youth unemployment too. The UK has suffered two all time record trade deficits in the last 18 months, all of George Osborne's economic predictions have been spectacularly missed and we have been stripped of our AAA rating by two of the three credit ratings agencies. The poor and ordinary have been made to bear the weight of austerity (benefits cut in real terms, in-work benefits slashed, below inflation rises in the National Minimum Wage, bedroom tax. workfare, sanctions, public sector pay freezes, cuts in public services, attacks on legal aid, mass public sector redundancies and the appalling Atos WCA assessment regime) whilst the wealthy have been coddled (top rate income tax cut, repeated corporation tax cuts, bankers bonuses defended in the European parliament, £billions in corporate outsourcing contracts, new tax-loopholes, mass privatsation of public assets into private hands).

It is particularly appalling to see that Warburtons have allowed their premises in Wednesbury to be used in order to allow George Osborne to spin his Orwellian misrepresentations about how the UK economy is "recovering", when the reality is that his ideological austerity experiment has caused economic chaos and a great deal of suffering to millions (including your own customers).

Until a public apology is made about your support for the Conservative party and the ideological austerity agenda you have implicitly supported through your association with this party, I shall be avoiding your products entirely and advising my friends and associates to do likewise.

I would appreciate it if you would take the time to respond to the concerns raised in this letter and either confirm or deny that a public apology will be forthcoming.

Regards,

[Your name]

=======================================================================

Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

More articles from
ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE   

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